Re: Generators (iterators) for Gnu Emacs

[Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>]

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On 12/07/2014 04:25 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
>   > I don't know Stefan's motives, but would love to see actual namespaces
>   > in Emacs Lisp.
> 
> The idea sounds nice in theory, but in practice multiple name spaces
> do not fit into Lisp very well.  Common Lisp packages are an unclean
> kludge; this was clear to me when I implemented them in the 1980s in
> the Lisp Machine.  It is impossible to use them in the way one would
> wish to use them.

The entire Common Lisp ecosystem is a counterexample so your rather
sweeping declaration. In practice, namespaces are rather useful despite
the need to *sometimes* fully *some* symbols. It's still better than
having to fully specify *every* symbol on *every* use.

> In practice, you have to write the package prefix whenever you refer
> to a symbol that has one.  It might as well be part of the symbol name
> itself.  Thus, packages complicate the language definition while
> providing no benefit.

There's a lot of Lisp code out there that uses packages in the way they
were meant to be used, and your personal distaste for the mechanism
shouldn't keep namespaces out of elisp.


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